We can thank our politicians in Washington, D.C. for doing a wonderful thing - even when it arrives as a bit of a paradox. In July, D.C. legislators refused to allow non-MD health care professionals to practice acupuncture with fewer than the minimum number of hours (1,725) now on the books. At the same time, they made getting a license less cumbersome. In the former case, an item in a bill that would have permitted naturopaths to practice acupuncture simply by virtue of their degrees in naturopathy was defeated. In the latter case, legislators agreed to omit the outdated requirement for physician oversight of acupuncturists, which made licensure in D.C. difficult.
It took a three-year effort by the Acupuncture Society of the District of Columbia (ASDC) to educate the City Council of the District of Columbia about our medicine and our profession. We also researched how much acupuncture is taught as part of the naturopathic curriculum in the four accredited naturopathic schools in the U.S. Naturopathic students receive introductory courses that range from 40 to 120 hours total; these figures exclude the few who pursue a dual track in acupuncture and naturopathy. The language of the bill that was finally passed reflected all of the changes that ASDC had requested. We were the only interest group to have had such success in this matter.
Teamwork, we found out, really does matter. We had invaluable assistance from our national professional organizations, such as the Council of Colleges of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine, the National Certification Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine, the Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine Alliance, and the American Association of Oriental Medicine. The Maryland Acupuncture Society helped ASDC enormously with a grant. Our pro bono lobbyist, Betsey Haywood, of the firm of Dickstein, Shapiro, Morin and Oshinsky, donated her time and wisdom, which proved crucial to our success. Finally, our fearless leader, ASDC president Lisa Eaves, can be credited for the pivotal suggestion to city council members to have Washington, D.C. come into line with national trends by deleting the much-outdated and ineffective physician oversight requirement.
Chronic pain afflicts over 20% of the adult population. Sadly, most MDs have essentially no education in treating pain, beyond offering a few toxic medications. Then they tend to steer people with pain away from those health practitioners who are trained. This puts the acupuncture community on the front lines for addressing this epidemic.
When the body is going through a stressful event, the sympathetic system is activated. This activation will help the body with a life-threatening situation. If this state is activated for prolonged periods of time, it starts to consume energy. These traumatic events that generate stressors in the autonomic nervous system (ANS) will eventually become internalized.
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One of the things that makes acupuncture so difficult to measure is that the medicine actually does contain some esoteric aspects. There have been numerous studies that demonstrate the neurochemical reasoning behind why acupuncture points stimulate the autonomic nervous system to enact change However, not all the benefits of TCM can easily be measured by randomized, controlled trials. But does that make them fundamentally and definitively untrue?
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